Stephen Heath’s scientific contributions

... Content Studies should build on strong theoretical foundations that recognise its interdisciplinary nature. Foundational theories in specific fields remain essential to understand, for example, the inseparability of content from its medium of delivery (McLuhan, 1964(McLuhan, , 2003, or how content operates on multiple levels of signification, working on denotative and connotative meaning (Barthes, 1977). Similar classical frameworks are enriched by contemporary contributions, such as the theory of multimodal communication (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001)-which examines how textual, visual, and auditory elements interact to construct meaning, emphasising the crucial role of design-the concept of digital materiality (Leonardi, 2010), which highlights how digital tools mediate the creation, dissemination, and reception of content, offering essential perspectives for studying algorithmically driven content systems-or the method of distant reading (Moretti, 2013), which makes possible to analyse large collections of texts computationally rather than closely examining individual texts, to identify broad patterns, trends, and structures across corpora using quantitative, data-driven methods. ...

Reference:

Content Studies: A New Academic Discipline for Analysing, Evaluating, and Designing Content in a Digital and AI-Driven Age